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The new Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the Hollywood Community Plan Update is now available for public comment. The 75-day public comment period will end on January 31, 2019. You can review the DEIR either online (Click Here) or at the following public libraries:

A new Hollywood Community Plan has been submitted and there are scoping meetings being held across the City of Los Angeles – Click here to see the NEW PLAN. We will post these meetings on the FACEBOOK SITE as well as on this website.

THE CITY-On June 20, Fix The City, Save Hollywood, La Mirada, HELP and Attorneys for the City of Los Angeles once again stepped into Judge Allan Goodman’s Superior Court to deal with the now-defunct Hollywood Community Plan update. More specifically, FTC and its fellow community groups were there to challenge what the City did in response to being ordered by the Court to scrap the flawed plan.

In February of this year the City was soundly defeated by the above coalition of community groups when Judge Goodman ordered the City to rescind its new Hollywood Community Plan.

The City did rescind the new plan and reenact the old plan. However, in the guise of complying with the Judge’s order, the City voted on April 2nd, 2014 to modify the General Plan Framework to make community plan monitoring and reporting discretionary. The City Council even went so far in the Resolution they adopted to deal with the stern admonition from the Court to state that the intent of their action was to “overrule and supersede” the writ and judgment of the Court. The judge was probably being very kind when he said that move was “too clever by half”.

But Judge Goodman did not stop there. He stated that the Resolution the City adopted was demonstrably arbitrary, capricious and without basis in law, that no reasonable person could conclude that adoption of the April 2ndResolution made the General Plan of the City of Los Angeles internally consistent but that the contrary was the case. Further he stated that the City’s actions constitute a misstatement and misapplication of the City Charter, state law and his February 11, 2014 Judgment.

This Los Angeles Times L.A. Now article says it all. Please read and, if you are one of those who attended hearings and stood up to the powers that be, it’s time to congratulate yourselves for a job well done! This has not been easy and, in spite of the published conclusions, the war is not over. This battle is a great win. We go forward now in hopes that the City will do the right thing and rewrite and circulate the Draft EIR for the Hollywood Community Plan with accurate data at its core and a heart for reasonable development for Hollywood.

On Tuesday February 18, 2014 the LA City Council passed Council motion 12-0303-S3. In part it said:

INSTRUCT the Planning Department, in consultation with the City Attorney, to:

a . Initiate the process of amending the General Plan’s Framework Element to make clear that the Framework Element does not require, and was never intended to require, Community Plans themselves to contain monitoring policies or programs, and that the Framework Element’s monitoring programs are discretionary, not mandatory, and that they are contingent on the availability of resources and competing priorities, as the Court of Appeal held in Saunders v. City of Los Angeles , Case No. B232415

It is possible to amend the General Plan, and the procedures are explained in detail in Charter section 555. All references to General Plan monitoring – which the Department of City Planning has overlooked since 1999 – could be excised from the citywide General Plan Framework Element. But it is incorrect that these monitoring provisions were originally intended to be discretionary. As a City Planning staff person who participated in the preparation of the General Plan Framework Element, there was never any discussion or written documentation presenting the Framework’s monitoring program and the annual monitoring report as discretionary. In fact, after the City Council adopted the General Plan Framework Element in 1996, I was assigned to a Framework monitoring unit that produced three annual monitoring reports in the late 1990s. Furthermore, the Framework’s monitoring requirements are also discussed in detail in the General Plan Framework Element’s Final Environmental Report, where it is clearly described as a detailed, mandatory, and on-going aspect of the General Plan Framework Element, not a discretionary feature contingent on available staffing. Continue reading →

The next step in the Hollywood Community Plan Update trial will occur on Tuesday, Feb 18, 2014 when the City is served with the Judgement and Writ ordering it to “rescind, vacate and set aside all actions approving the [HCPU] and all actions certifying [the EIR] adopted in connection therewith, as well as all related approvals issued in furtherance of the HCPU,” passed on June 19, 2012. The City has the option to comply with the judge’s order, offer a negotiated settlement with the petitioners or to appeal the judgment within 60 days.

The City Council will hear a motion to draft the necessary ordinance to comply with the judgement at the Tuesday session.

City Attorney Mike Feuer has sent a letter to the City Council requesting a closed session meeting to discuss the challenges to the City Council’s June 19, 2012, adoption of the Hollywood Community Plan Update (HCPU) and its environmental impact report.

Last month Judge Goodman agreed with the three challengers, La Mirada Neighborhood Association, Fix the City and Save Hollywood, that the Hollywood Community Plan Update was fatally flawed as a planning document. It failed to comply with CEQA, and CEQA Guidelines and was not consistent with the Charter of the City of Los Angeles, the General Plan Framework Element and other applicable laws. Continue reading →

As someone who actually conducted research that was used for the lawsuits challenging the Hollywood Community Plan Update, I take issue with the claims of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce that the Update’s Draft Environmental Impact Report was released two months before 2010 Census Data was released. Continue reading →